Ask a member how many people run their trade association, and you will usually get a number two or three times too high. The reality is a secretariat of four. Maybe five. Between them they handle membership records, event registrations, renewal chasing, council papers and payroll, and a good portion of those lives in a spreadsheet only one person really understands.

It works. It works right up until she takes two weeks off in December, and nobody can find the renewal tracker.

There is a particular awkwardness to this, because the same association spends much of the year telling members to digitalise. The circulars go out. The seminars are organised. Meanwhile, the secretariat is reconciling claims from a shoebox of receipts. A programme exists for exactly this problem, and most TACs either have not heard of it or are convinced the window shut last year.

A grant aimed at how you run, not how you look

The Digitalisation of TACs Programme (Digi-TAC) is jointly led by the Singapore Business Federation and SGTech, with support from Enterprise Singapore. The stated aim is to help TACs become digital at the core, and that last phrase is doing real work. This is not a website subsidy. It is not a marketing grant. It funds the systems your secretariat uses to run itself.

Two strands. The first covers pre-approved digital solutions across core corporate functions. The second funds training for secretariat staff, on the sensible assumption that software nobody has been shown how to use ends up as an expensive login page.

The numbers, plainly

Most associations underestimate this one, so here it is without decortion:

• 70% support on qualifying costs

• S$30,000 cap per programme year

• S$60,000 total across the three-year programme

• The annual cap resets each programme year

That last point matters more than it looks. The funding is built to be spent across several projects in sequence, not blown on one system in year one. Qualifying costs generally mean the solution and its associated training, not your staff’s time, not your rent.

Where most associations find out they do not qualify

Read this bit before you take anything to the council. A TAC must:

• Be registered with the Registry of Societies or ACRA

• Represent the business interests of a trade or industry sector whose members operate in or from Singapore

• Have a Management Committee, Board or Council overseeing its activities

• Operate full-time from Singapore, in commercial premises, with a local telephone number

• Employ at least three full-time salaried staff

• Have at least 50 members, with at least 75% of them being SMEs

• Not have taken government funding for a similar project, or installed a comparable solution for the same capability in the past three years

The three-staff threshold and the 50-member rule are where smaller associations come unstuck. Check those two before you check anything else.

The functions nobody has time to own

Nobody joins a secretariat to administer HR. But in a team of four, someone ends up doing it anyway, usually on top of whatever they were actually hired for. Leave requests arrive by email and get typed into a spreadsheet. Claims pile up until month end. Payroll belongs to whoever has run it longest, which quietly turns that person’s annual leave into an operational risk.

None of this is a crisis. It is just a slow leak. Every hour spent chasing a claim form is an hour not spent on the member programmes and industry work that justifies the subscription in the first place. Digitalising it is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets deferred year after year, and it is precisely the kind of project Digi-TAC was designed to fund. JustLogin is one of the pre-approved solutions available under the programme.

Getting through the application

More administrative than difficult:

• Confirm eligibility against the SBF criteria

• Get a formal quote from a pre-approved vendor

• Submit through the SBF online form

• Allow roughly a month for processing once SBF has everything

• For the claim: proof of payment, evidence that at least two secretariat staff attended training, and a project sign-off

That training condition catches people out. Two staff members and not an IT-minded colleague on his own. Associations that treat the rollout as a technical task rather than a team one tends to discover this at the claim stage, which is a bad time to discover it.

Practising what you advocate

Your advice carries further when it matches how you operate. A secretariat that has been through its own digitalisation; the messy data, the staff who preferred the old way, the fortnight where both systems ran in parallel has something genuinely useful to tell members. Rather more useful than a circular encouraging them to look into PSG.

Applications for Digi-TAC are open until 30 August 2026.

If you want to see what an HR and payroll implementation would actually cost your association after grant support, our team can walk you through the numbers and the paperwork: https://justlogin.com/digi-tac/